From the course: InDesign Secrets

269 Fix Illustrator place problems - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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269 Fix Illustrator place problems

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- [Instructor] I get a lot of questions from clients, as you can imagine, and also just from general users, about InDesign, and I'd say that maybe about once every couple months, I hear the same complaint, or question, and it always has to do with placing Illustrator files into InDesign, and that complaint is, how come when I place an illustrator file, it sometimes comes in as a tiny graphic on a big page, and I have to crop all the empty space out? Other times it doesn't do that. What am I doing wrong? That's an excellent question. Let me show you what the problem is, and how to solve it. We're looking here at a template handout that I've created for our speakers at the InDesign conference, indesignconference.com, little plug, and I want to go to the master page, and place our logo, which is done in Illustrator. I've already opened it up here in Illustrator. So, here's our logo. There it is, there's nothing else on the page. I come to InDesign, I go to file, place, and it is this guy right here. I'll go ahead and click open, and there is the problem. The background here is transparent, but sometimes it also comes in white. Why do I constantly need to do this every time I bring it in, but other times when I bring it in, it's just the logo by itself? Now, there's actually two solutions to this problem. The first one is the dumb one, but it will work, and that is to go to Illustrator, choose your art board tool, and then actually reduce the size of this document down to this, and then that will work. Now, I've already done that to this document and saved it, as outlines small, so I'll come back over here, and I'll place the small one. Click open, and that's what we're looking for, right? But actually, you can get this result on that large one as well. This is what you do, when you go to place it, I'm going to press command or control D, and I'll get the large one, not the small one, make sure and turn on show import options. Click open, and the problem is occurring right here, under what it's supposed to crop to when you bring it in. Right now, it's set to crop to trim, meaning the trim size of the page, or art board in Illustrator. That's not what we want, and in fact, that's not the default setting, so somebody must've changed it, and that setting is sticky throughout this session of InDesign. The default is bounding box, visible layers only, and you can see the little marquis change here as I switch from trim to bounding box. Equivalent to bounding box would be art, right around there. So, it's either art, or bounding box, the ones that you want to choose. Crop, trim, bleed, media, these all have to do with the size of the page itself, or the art board itself. If all you want to do is bring in the art on that page, you don't care how big the art board is, go ahead and choose either art or bounding box. I'm going to choose art. Click okay, perfect. It's even better than that first small version that I did, because it kiss fits the artwork exactly. That's the solution.

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